Mr Midshipman VC: The Short Accident-Prone Life of George Drewry, Gallipoli Hero

Introduction and Acknowledgments

When I arrived for the first time on the peninsula in May 2012, my knowledge of the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign was principally informed by repeated viewings down the years of Gallipoli, Peter Weir’s beautifully crafted and movingly acted, if highly sentimentalized, Anzac version of events which was released to deserved acclaim in 1981.

Coincidentally, I happened to be in South Australia during its much-anticipated production and, although some scenes of pre-battle training were filmed in Egypt, the blood-spattered beaches, gullies and ravines of 1915 were actually recreated about 400 miles from Adelaide, by the seaside and on the cliffs in and around Port Lincoln, including a cove that has now been re-named Gallipoli Beach.

However, while the actual authenticity of Weir’s rather fine film is perhaps a little dubious, the real-life sacrifice of more than 44,000 Allied dead – almost double that on the Turkish side – in an eight-month campaign still remains palpable more than a century after the events.

Among the 22,000 fatalities of the British Empire, excluding Anzacs – which accounted for fully half that number – was my wife’s great uncle, Major John Jocelyn Doyne Sillery (known as ‘Jack’) of the 11th Battalion, Manchester Regiment, who landed at Gallipoli on 6 August. It was a mission to try and find his memorial that had first drawn us to this battlefield tour.

In 1915 the 11th Manchesters were part of 34 Infantry Brigade. On that early August day, a little over three months after the campaign’s first amphibious landings had taken place, the 11th embarked on lighters and was towed by destroyers to Suvla Bay, on the west side of the peninsula, about 5 miles beyond Anzac Cove. They grounded 200–300 yards north of Lala Baba, a fortified post held by the Turks at the south of the bay.

The landing was extremely difficult since they were in about 6ft of water, and every man had to be got ashore by means of a rope held by two officers, one on the lighter and one in the water.

According to the Manchester Regiment website: ‘Major Sillery landed first in order to collect the men as they came ashore, and other officers were landed at intervals. The landing was carried out under heavy rifle fire from Lala Baba and shrapnel fire from further inland. When the disembarkation had been completed the C.O. found the battalion resting on the beach with bayonets fixed, and ready to move against the ridges to the north of the bay …’

Some further light is thrown on the individual work of the officers and men of the regiment in a letter from a sergeant major of the battalion, which appeared in The Ashton Herald (11 September 1915):

Our division made a new landing. We came in the night, and as soon as we ran the lighters in shore they gave us hell, many men being killed and wounded in the boats. We stuck on a sandbank, and the bullets rained upon us all round. The Colonel called Tallest men first. I slipped on board, and half-swam and half-waded ashore – a distance of about 200 yards – and was accompanied by the Adjutant and Major Sillery. I was the first man ashore with a rifle. We lay down on the beach, and then started to collect men together as they struggled ashore, and then formed them up.

After a while, and under heavy fire, we managed to get some formation, and fixed bayonets. We then moved off, while bullets still whizzed and shells boomed and burst around us.

Slowly we advanced, wondering how long we could last. After about a mile we got to work, and then the boys proceeded to get their own back, clearing the trenches of Turks with the bayonet. Orders had been given that no shots were to be fired – it was to be all bayonet work …’

Jack Sillery was never seen alive again and he has no known grave. He was mentioned in despatches and is remembered, we were gratified to discover, with honour on the impressive Helles Memorial at the windblown southernmost tip of the peninsula. It takes the form of an obelisk over 30 metres high that can be seen by ships passing through the Dardanelles. He was 48.

Less than a year later, Jack’s older brother – my wife’s paternal grandfather – Lieutenant Colonel Charles Cecil Archibald Sillery of the 20th (Tyneside Scottish) Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers, died on 1 July 1916 at the Somme leading his men into battle. He was 54.

Although our priority had initially been family-orientated, it was soon overtaken by an overwhelming sense of a far bigger and bloodier picture, albeit painfully confined to this oddly picturesque killing ground just 48 miles long by 4 miles wide, flanked by the Aegean on one side and the Dardanelles Strait, leading to the Sea of Marmara, on the other.

We’d cross each day to the peninsula by means of a fifteen-minute ferry ride from the bustling seaside town of Canakkale, on the Asia side. Just a 45-minute drive from the ancient Homeric city of Troy, Canakkale also happens to boast, on its ‘prom’, the giant wooden horse especially recreated for the 2004 film, Troy, very loosely based on the Iliad.

We walked strenuously, even at times a little hazardously, where troops fought and died a century earlier in mostly foul conditions, ranging from blistering heat to extreme cold as the seasons changed dramatically between April 1915 and January 1916. En route, we were treated to a colourful account of the various actions, which might, in lesser hands, have been rather cool and detached.

However, as illuminated by the estimable Clive Harris, an ex-army man with an infectious grasp of military history, the focus was as much on the human stories, the heroics and the sacrifice, as on the tangled politics, command mismanagement, an insufficient understanding of the terrain, as well as the, sometimes arcane, ordnance detail.

And such stories, individual and ensemble; twelve Victoria Crosses awarded for the very first day of the invasion as Allied troops made their way ashore on to the beaches beneath Cape Helles, most notably on to W Beach – site of the ‘Six VCs before breakfast’ exploits of the Lancashire Fusiliers – and V Beach, a disembarkation shambles, despite the selfless feats of some Navy men, among them 20-year-old George Leslie Drewry. George had been at sea with the Merchant Marine since the age of 14 before joining the Royal Naval Reserve as a midshipman or ‘Snotty’.

As we stood above Ertugrul Cove (officially designated V Beach), at Sedd-el-Bahr, near the Turkish memorial of Yahya Cavus Sehitligi ve Aniti (where the Ottomans counter-attacked that morning), Clive spent perhaps just five minutes or so on Mr Midshipman Drewry, one of six VCs at V Beach. But even in that short time, he painted such a vivid picture of Drewry that it was seared forever into my imagination.

It was of a young man who, after an accident-prone teenage full of unusual, often near fatal, incident, still managed to survive, despite head wounds and the horrors of that last week in April, only to die accidentally – almost tragi-comically in view of what he had already gone through three years earlier – in August, 1918, just a few months shy of the Armistice.

That he also returned to the beaches at Gallipoli as part of the equally disastrous August landings on exactly the same day as Jack Sillery disembarked and then died, only served further to fuel my interest in a fascinating subject, to which now was added an almost spookily serendipitous sense of a genuine family connection.

Over the next four days, as we moved about the scarred terrain, further punctuated here and there with beautifully-maintained cemeteries containing the named and the unknown, Clive told us about other, often equally astonishing, deeds undertaken in places whose quaint-sounding names belied the gory reality. Like The Vineyard, where the ‘Cigarette VC’, William Forshaw of the 9th Manchesters, lit grenade fuses from his gaspers while chain-smoking for hours on end before hurling them at the attacking Turks; Lone Pine, which yielded no fewer than seven Anzac VCs; and The Tennis Court, where 300 Australians in three desperate waves fell in hours from 4.30am on 7 August – coincidentally the same day Jack Sillery probably died – trying to capture the elusive Nek.

This last, incidentally, was the inspiration for the final assault filmed so dramatically in agonising slow motion for Weir’s Gallipoli.

I was also touched, as by so many before me, by the sentiments on a large stone memorial high above Anzac Cove, which proclaimed, poignantly, the following:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours … You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

It has been attributed – although some now believe, wrongly – to the Turkish commander, Mustafa Kemal, later Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

A little over five years later, I found myself back at Cape Helles, now with a handsomely re-furbished memorial, but this time round I was properly armed, albeit metaphorically, with an almost overwhelming weight of research material – much historically familiar, some, more personal, rather less so – gleaned greedily during the space between my two visits.

Although not a significant element in this particular tale, I began to grasp more fully the significance of the Anzac involvement in the campaign and its enduring legacy; also to understand more about the role of Churchill, who in his role as First Lord of the Admiralty, has consistently been painted a principal villain of the piece.

I was particularly moved reading Jeremy Paxman’s Great Britain’s Great War, which was published during the first year of the centenary, ahead of his BBC TV series on the same subject. Notable were his typically pugnacious reflections on Gallipoli where his great uncle Charlie, of the Royal Army Medical Corps, was killed.

‘The levels of incompetence displayed,’ he wrote, ‘make it hard to consider the entire adventure as anything other than a misguided, irrelevant and costly sideshow which wasted scarce resources and undermined morale. The Dardanelles campaign demonstrated the chasm between the young men who had volunteered to fight the war and the old men who directed it.’

The blame game, I discovered, continues to this day, but what seems to remain indisputable is perhaps best summed up by one of the fiercest contemporary critics of the campaign, British journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett.

In between regularly excoriating the British High Command, its strategy and tactics, both at the time and not long after in his 1928 memoir, unambiguously titled Uncensored Dardanelles, he was equally unequivocal about George and his naval fellows that day in April when he wrote, ‘Then it was that one of those gallant acts of devotion was performed which brighten the darkest pages of warfare.’

A newish addition to the peninsula, I noted last year, was the impressive Canakkale Epic Promotion Centre, part of a refurbished museum, near the village of Kabatepe. In eleven walk-through galleries, it tells the story, some of it in 3D, of the campaign – known locally as ‘The Battle of Canakkale’ – albeit from a predominantly Turkish point of view.

Then, on 2 August 2017, exactly 99 years to the day after he died, I was in the Orkneys casting my eyes across the gleaming waters of Scapa Flow under a brilliant blue sky to where George would find his final anchorage. Nowadays large cruise liners rather than the Grand Fleet account for the most significant shipping in those parts.

That George so gallantly shed his blood at Gallipoli yet lived to fight another day only then to lose his life so prosaically away from the immediate heat of battle, and within touching distance of home and peace, seemed at that moment to suggest an almost irresistibly literary, even perversely romantic, ingredient to an already epically tragic tale.

So, as I pondered a suitable title, Captain Frederick Marryat’s Mr Midshipman Easy, that classic and still oddly timeless pre-Victorian ‘Boys’ Own’ yarn of Royal Naval derring-do, immediately suggested itself, with its convenient nautical parallels and irresistibly similar titular ring.

George’s sacrifice among an estimated total of some eighteen million, also brought to mind in this centenary, some words of Hilary Mantel who delivered a recent series of Reith Lectures. She said: ‘My concern as a writer is with memory, personal and collective; with the restless dead asserting their claims … giving voice to those who have been silenced.’

George’s own ‘voice’, modest to a fault, is limited here specifically just to four long letters he wrote to his father in 1915 following his involvement at V Beach then Suvla Bay. So my concern was to try and evoke his whole life, not just through his own words, but also through the testimony of fellow combatants as well the remembrance of others.

This notion, in turn, compelled me to re-read Professor Paul Fussell’s wonderful The Great War and Modern Memory, first published in 1975, which explored, as the distinguished author, a veteran of the Second World War, put it, ‘some of the literary means by which it has been remembered, conventionalized and mythologized’.

However, as his influential thesis was strictly limited to the Western Front, I decided that I would attempt an affectionate ‘nod’ rather than rigorously academic homage to Fussell on behalf of what has sometimes been dismissively termed a ‘Great War sideshow’.

Of, in particular, the writers and poets of the Great War, Fussell posed these questions: ‘What did the war feel like to those whose world was the trenches? How did they get through this bizarre experience? And finally, how did they transform their feelings into language and literary form?’

So, as well as poring through strictly factual accounts, many dotted with the affecting accounts of eyewitnesses to the unfolding debacle, I also mined some of the fiction and poetry provoked by the campaign. This led me to writers, poets and artists as diverse as A.P. Herbert, John Masefield, Compton Mackenzie, Ernest Raymond, Rachel Billington, Louis de Bernières, Alexander Kent (aka Douglas Reeman), Laurence Binyon, Geoffrey Dearmer, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Siegfried Sassoon, Michael J. Whelan, Norman Wilkinson and Herbert Hillier, all of whom had either first-hand or familial connections with Gallipoli.

Rupert Brooke, a 27-year-old temporary sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, would, most likely, have been part of that preceding roll call had he not died of sepsis in the Greek islands following a mosquito bite. That was on 23 April, ironically the very day originally scheduled for the Cape Helles landings, and ‘in sight of the windy plains of Troy’, as one soldier would recall it.

It’s certainly true that the region’s Homeric connection held an extra fascination for a particular class of Englishman such as Brooke, raised with the classics, and evoked typically by, say, Binyon in his poem Gallipoli, which begins:

Isles of the Aegean, Troy, and waters of Hellespont!

You we have known from of old,

Since boyhood stammering glorious Greek was entranced

In the tale that Homer told.

There scornful Achilles towered and flamed through the battle,

Defying the gods; and there

Hector armed, and Andromache proudly held up his boy to him,

Knowing not yet despair.

However, Masefield, for his account of the campaign, published in 1916, eschewed Greek myth for an alternative literary muse, the eleventh century epic poem, The Song of Roland, recalling Charlemagne’s crusade against Saracen Muslims in Spain.

His beautifully-written but surprisingly uncritical account of Gallipoli – that it was ‘dedicated with the deepest admiration and respect’ to General Hamilton and his officers and men’ might be a clue – feels almost like some sort of retro apologia for the campaign.

Whether his clearly ardent sentiments, typified by the following, might have been compensation for individual loss is decidedly moot.

As each ship crammed with soldiers drew near the battleship the men swung their caps and cheered again, and the soldiers answered, and the noise of cheering swelled, and the men in the ships not yet moving joined in, and the men ashore, till all the life in the harbour was giving thanks that it could go to death rejoicing. All was beautiful in that gladness of men about to die, but the most moving thing